A weekend fashion photo shoot at the National Holocaust Monument was an inappropriate use of the site, which Jewish leaders say should be a place for reflection and learning, not levity.

“It’s not a place for fashion shoot,” said Mina Cohn, director of the Centre for Holocaust Education and Scholarship at Carleton University’s Max and Tessie Zelikovitz Centre for Jewish Studies. “You wouldn’t do a fashion shoot at the National War Memorial downtown. That is not acceptable. And it’s not acceptable here either.”

Cohn, the child of two Holocaust survivors, was reacting to being told visitors to the monument Sunday afternoon stumbled upon a fashion shoot being done inside the monument, using its bare concrete walls and sharp lines as a backdrop.

An Instagram post by Montreal clothing designer Michèle Beaudoin uploaded Sunday shows a woman standing at the monument wearing a dress made of strips of grey fabric. The dress is very revealing and covers the model’s bare backside with grey lace. The distinctive angles of the monument are easily identifiable and the Canadian War Museum is visible in the background.

“Little behind the scenes of today’s shoot,” Beaudoin wrote in her post. “Amazing photos coming later” she says, identifying noted Ottawa fashion photographer Richard Tardif along with the makeup and hair stylist and the model.

The Instagram post was deleted after Beaudoin was contacted by this paper.

In an emailed response to questions, Tardif said: “While we understand your interest in writing an article on the use of public space, Michèle Beaudoin and I do not wish to add our views on this matter. “On Sunday afternoon, after further consideration, we decided to end the session and discontinue the project. Also, all material has been deleted.” Cohn said people who behave disrespectfully at the site are missing its point.

A man stops to take a photo of the Canadian National Holocaust Monument following its official opening ceremony in Ottawa on Sept. 27, 2017.Â Adrian Wyld /
THE CANADIAN PRESS

It’s a place to reflect. A place to remember. It’s a place to educate oneself. It’s not a place for a picnic. We don’t have a guard for it. How are we going to make sure that people respect it? Only by educating them.” The National Capital Commission, which oversees the monument, said it has received and approved informal requests for photos and videos to be taken at the site — for architectural magazines or documentaries, for example — but has never issued a formal permit. Several months ago, someone asked to do a fashion shoot at the site, but the request was turned down, said NCC spokesman Jean Wolff.

The monument is under surveillance by multiple security cameras and is patrolled intermittently by security guards, he said.

The $4.7-million star-shaped monument at the corner of Booth and Wellington streets officially opened in September 2017 after decades of debate. The concrete surfaces plaques outlining the history of the Holocaust along with huge monochromatic photos of significant Holocaust sites by Toronto photographer Edward Burtynsky.

The behaviour of people at sites of remembrance was the subject of the 2016 documentary Austerlitz by Ukrainian filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa. The 90-minute film shows casually dressed tourists taking selfies in the crematoriums at the Nazis’ Dachau death camp. Though there is no narration, the filmmaker forces the audience to consider what is and what is not an appropriate way to remember atrocities.

“Every site has its own implicit protocol,” said Rabbi Reuven Bulka, who spoke at the official opening of the Ottawa monument last fall and called Sunday’s photo shoot a “desecration of a sacred site.”

“You could go to the Oscar Peterson statue (at the National Arts Centre) and do a musical interlude. That would make a lot of sense. It’s a nice tribute to him.

“Here’s a place that commemorates the murder of six million Jews. Why would you do anything so inconsistent such as making it into a place of levity?”

Families who lost relatives in the Holocaust would be offended to learn that the monument was used for something as frivolous as a fashion shoot, Bulka said.

“I don’t understand that people could do something like that and think it was appropriate. Are they breaching any law? Probably not. But it breaches common sense.”

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